Any tips on how to do that? Over the last year or so I find that I have lost passion for both my job and my side-projects. While I used to be happy working 60-80 hours a week between my job and side-projects, I now find both of them mundane and can't pull off such focus. With side-projects it probably boils down to not finding success...
In terms of success: I have dozens of side projects lying around, some of them educational, some practical, most unfinished.
It is completely fine, even beneficial to do so. At work you are already forced to finish and maintain stuff. Giving yourself some free, playful space balances this out.
Also in time some of those things trickle down (quasi) to your day job, or at least it has for me repeatedly. Not in the exact form I was expecting, but in tangible ways nonetheless.
There are two things that eventually keep me “on track” when I have a low phase: reminding myself that I’m a creator with ridiculous power at my fingertips is one. I keep a collection of notes with interesting and fun ideas (together with a friend). The other is more like a safety net so to speak: I seek long term financial security. This is one helps especially when I think about people close to me and how I can be strong for them.
If you can't name one important outcome for your job, maybe it's time to change jobs. OTOH, if all you lack is directing your attention to these important outcomes, I'd recommend some rituals like meditation.
Isn't this against the spirit of globalization and free/open markets? Or is that just meant for companies to benefit from cheap labor but not for consumers to be able to shop around?
(These are general questions, I don't necessarily mean that you are pro-globalization.)
The FAST article mentions how using the ratio of short term seismic activity to long term activity to detect seismic events is prone to false positives. With this approach, you "pick" a discrete time when the seismic wave first reaches a given station, and then using knowledge of the speed of sound in the subsurface you perform nonlinear regression to locate the the point in time and space that minimizes the travel time error. However, this gets tricky when your algorithm picks the wrong arrival time, and picks a truck driving by instead of the actual seismic wave. Now your estimate of when and where the earthquake occurred has a substantial amount of error.
If you have enough stations for the seismic detection to be over defined (n > 4), one way around this is to consider all spikes in seismic activity as event picks, and then iteratively discard outlier picks until you're either left with an earthquake detection that has a residual travel time error within some acceptance threshold, or you run out of picks to make an over defined solution. This approach ends up being very, very fast.
This sounds harsh. In cases you are a significant contributor to a launch it should be signifiend in the "launch entry" (there's an internal tracking tool for all launches).
You then of course need to sell your contribution:
- It was nothing less than ciritical for the success of the project
- It required deep technical knowledge
- It required communication with other teams
- It required mastery of several technologies, etc.
The teammate in question should hepefully support these claims.
Googler here: I think that gaming metrics is not that easy. Here by metrics I mean things like:
- Your impact on revenue (if you work in ads)
- Your impact on search quality (as assesed by independent raters)
- Etc.
If you can "game" these, I think you are solid.
My advice would be to try to come up with your own project ideas (related to what your or other very close team is already working on). Often times, people stick around in their teams for a long time and there is not much inovation -- you are a new guy can bring some fresh perspective.
People who get promoted the fastest are usually those who are self driven and start projects from their own initiative.
Google is changing the promotion process such that managers have much more power (for all promotions up to level 5 == senior swe).
Previously it used to be, as Michael says, very much in the hands of the committee members who never heard about you or even your team.
Now the committee will be composed of your manager and some other two managers from a related team. The committee will not see your own promotion rationale or your own description of your projects and achievements, rather it will be the job of your manager to present these points and advocate on your behalf. The committee (except for your manager) will also see only limited peer feedback compared to before -- no free form text, only multiple choice questions/answers.
If all three managers agree that you meet the bar, you get promoted.
Sounds like googlers should go manager shopping then. If your manager is too passive or doesn't care for what you're working on, you'll be in the same boat.
I would trust my manager to not abuse that power. If he would start using it, I'd first try to change team or, if not possible, just change employer. Hopefully, for the sake of the organisation, people quitting would reflect badly on the manager over time.
The point being, it's much easier for me to manage the relationship with my manager than with some anonymous committee that doesn't even know me. The manager is already important enough that I would not keep him if he seemed more interested in personal agendas than his subordinates.
Googler here: The google performance and promotion process does, in fact, rely on reviews from your peers. The process happens once every 6 months, every other being non-mandatory.
Although your peers saying you were helpful is not enough, you need to demonstrate impact (and other attributes depending on your level).
